Friday, 12 August 2016

UNREST AT SWAZI KING’S NEWSPAPER

Members
of the Media Workers Union of Swaziland (MWUS) have gathered near the offices
of the Swazi Observer for several
days to protest low wages, management intimidation and poor working conditions.
The union was barred from holding an actual picket by Swaziland’s High Court,
writes Kenworthy News Media.

Negotiations
between the Swazi Observer, a
newspaper in effect owned and controlled by absolute monarch King Mswati III,
and MWUS had started in April, but no real progress has been made since they
became deadlocked in June.

Fair pay
and decent working conditions
The union demands a 25 percent pay rise, that senior reporters ought to be
allowed to be members of a union of their choice, an end what it calls job
promotion nepotism and intimidation of union-affiliated members, newly serviced
cars that are safe do drive, proper medical aid and the resignation of the
managing director.

According
to a statement released by MWUS in June, the Swazi Observer management countered by offering no pay rise and the
newspapers’ managing director said that management would “plant intelligence
within all the departments of the company”, something that was condemned by the
union as “threat and intimidating antics”.

Police
intimidation
“There is an employee who earns as little as 1500 emalangeni [€100] a month and
many of our members are subject to risky conditions as they are made to drive
cars which have long been stopped being serviced. One member reported a car he
was driving had its steering wheel disconnecting while the car was in motion,”
Secretary General of MWUS Sicelo Vilane told members gathered outside the
offices of the Swazi Observer on Monday.

An hour
after he held his speech, Sicelo Vilane was approached by an intelligence
officer who introduced himself only as “Mkhwanazi,” who told Vilane that the
police wished to “form part of the negotiations as a third part”. MWUS sees
this as a measure of intimidation against the union.

There are
also indications that Sicelo Vilane might be arrested for contempt of court for
allegedly defying a court order that barred the protesting workers from
entering the premises of the Swazi
Observer, even though he is adamant that none of the union members had done
so and that there had been no wrongdoing on the part of him or the union.

Media
censorship and harassmentThere
have been many previous indications that all is not well at the Swazi Observer and in the Swazi media in
general. In 2009, Swazi Observer
managing editor Mbongeni Mbingo nearly lost his job for publishing a piece on
the king’s fleet of luxury cars. He later wrote, in an article published on the website of the
Freidrich Ebert Stiftung, that “the press in Swaziland is largely expected to
toe the line and be a lapdog not a watchdog.”

In their 2015 “Freedom of the
Press”-report, American
research-NGO Freedom House describes how king Mswati “further restrained an
already weakened media environment in Swaziland, [where] both journalists and
media outlets were targeted by officials through the use of restrictive
legislation” and how “the government withholds advertising contracts from
critical media outlets”.

According
to the Human Rights Watch 2016 world
report,
“journalists and activists [in Swaziland] who criticized the government were
often harassed and arrested … Many journalists practiced self-censorship,
especially with regard to reports involving the king to avoid harassment by
authorities”.